Free Survivalist - 20 - Firestorm by Jerry Ahern

had no choice.
    Jason Darkwood started walking-slowly because he couldn’t walk rapidly-toward the door to the outside. If Freidrich Rausch were waiting for him, then the thing would get over with quickly, one way or the other.
    Darkwood gripped the pistol tighter.

Chapter Thirteen
    It was a tape player, not modern like those of new Germany, but state-of-the-art for the era of John Rourke’s earlier life in the Twentieth Century. It was from one of the Eden Project supply caches.
    “You must know, Herr Doctor, that you cannot win. Ours is an historic struggle. I have calculated your actual chronological age to arrive at the date of your birth. What a pity! I feel terrible sorrow for you that you were born only after the great hero of humanity was sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity as a sacrifice to the demagogues of the self-styled democracies. To have lived in those days when Der Fuhrer walked the earth like mortal man and to have breathed air that might have touched him-”
    John Rourke pushed the button for stop and the tape machine clicked off.
    Freidrich Rausch had been smarter than John Rourke’s reappraisal of the man’s capabilities had even suggested. Somewhere along the corridor, there would be a photo-electric eye or pressure sensitive strip. John Rourke’s having passed through or on whatever it was had activated the tape recorder’s play mechanism. Rausch had intentionally come here, to the most remote of the interior perimeter outposts. And killed.
    Near Rourke’s feet, as he shone the light, were two bodies, throats slashed ear to ear, one body that of an American Marine from Mid-Wake, the other that of a commando of New Germany.
    John Thomas Rourke took the cassette from the recorder. Something-some random sound in the background - anything might prove of some use.
    And he ran.
    Because Freidrich Rausch would be at the heart of the hospital complex, ready to kill Jason Darkwood, if Darkwood weren’t dead already…
    Jason Darkwood’s head ached with the movement. Doctor Munchen had told him to expect some pain, even some disorientation under mental or physical stress. The blow to his head had been severe. He was feeling vaguely nauseated.
    Darkwood’s palms sweated. Pain. Disorientation. Yes. He had both. And mere was a chemical reaction going on in his body that was making things very bad for him..
    He touched his left hand to the locking bolt on the door leading to the outside, to the snowdrifted courtyard.
    He slid the bolt back.
    His left hand gripped the door handle, his right fist tightening on the butt of the 2418 A2.
    “Open the door,” Darkwood told himself. “Ifs only a door. ItH be a little cold. Thafs all right. Anything out there, hey, no problems. I blow it away with this.” He held the pistol close by his right side. He wished he had one of the thirty-round magazines in it instead of only a fifteen. Then he would have had thirty-one shots instead of only sixteen.
    He didn’t.
    He twisted the door handle. The door was stack.
    Darkwood tugged at it, a cold sweat breaking out over his kidneys, under his armpits, dizziness sweeping over him. He pulled harder and the door opened, an icy wind almost knocking him down, swirling around inside his hospital room like the terrestrial whirlwinds he had studied about in geography and climatology classes when he was a boy in school.
    He shivered. “The wind,” Darkwood murmured.
    Snow was drifted several feet high beside where the door had been and it formed a flange there now, at the base and on the left hand side of the doorframe as well, sculpted flat and smooth, grainy, textured too.
    “Anybody out there?”
    Only the wind replied …
    John Rourke reached the center corridor running as he spoke into
    the walkie-talkie. “He can hear us, Sam, hear us, I’d lay money on it. He can hear every word we say. He’s closing in on Darkwood right now, if he hasn’t gotten him already.”
    “My two Marines-that mother fucker. They’re not